Empowering the Physical

and Political Self: Women

and the Practice of
Self-Defense, 1890–1920
Wendy Rouse, San Jose State University
and
Beth Slutsky, University of California, Davis

First-wave feminists in the Progressive Era found ways to make the polit-
ical physical by empowering their bodies. As the women’s suffrage move-
ment gained momentum, advocates for women’s self-defense training in
England and in the United States insisted that all women were physically
capable of defending themselves and should learn self-defense not only to
protect themselves physically but to empower themselves psychologically
and politically for the battles they would face in both the public and private
spheres. Militant suffragettes used their bodies to convey discontent and
resist oppression through marches, pickets, and hunger strikes. Yet, and
perhaps more importantly, even average women, with no direct association
with suffrage organizations, expressed a newfound sense of empowerment
through physical training in boxing, wrestling, and jiu-jitsu.1 This paper
considers the ways in which women during the first wave of feminism
empowered their bodies to fight assault, sexism, and disfranchisement
through their training in the “manly art” of self-defense. Although not
all women who embraced physical training and martial arts had explicit
or implicit political motives, women’s self-defense figuratively and literally
challenged the power structure that prevented them from exercising their
full rights as citizens and human beings.

On a spring evening in 1909, Wilma Berger decided to go for a short

walk near the lake after work. Twenty-year-old Berger, a white
woman and the daughter of a prominent local doctor, was studying
to be a nurse at the Henrotin Hospital in downtown Chicago. As she

1
Please note that there are multiple spellings for jiu-jitsu (“jujutsu” being the pre-
ferred modern spelling). We have used “jiu-jitsu,” since this was the most common
spelling during the period under study.

The Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era | 13:4 Oct. 2014 doi:10.1017/S1537781414000383 470
 walked along Ontario Street and approached Lake Michigan, she
suddenly felt a piercing pain from a blow to her head. In the next
instant, a stranger’s arm was around her neck and pulling her to
the ground. Just as she came to her senses and prepared to stand
up, a man sat on top of her, pinning her firmly down. The attacker
clenched her throat with a choking grip with one hand and used his
other hand to cover her mouth to prevent her from screaming. At
first Berger panicked. But then she decided to relax and wait for
her opportunity. As soon as she saw her chance, she caught hold
of the man’s sleeve, pulled his arms in toward her, and sent him fly-
ing through the air with a jiu-jitsu technique. She quickly scrambled
to her feet. Seeing that he, too, was getting up, she threw him to the
ground again. Berger immediately fled to safety knowing that she
had successfully fought back against a violent surprise attack.2

The publicity surrounding the incident vaulted Berger into local

celebrity status as newspapers praised her mental prowess and
physical skill in fighting off the attacker.3 Reporters revealed that
Berger had previously studied judo under Tomita Tsunejiro in
New York City before teaching her own female students in
Colorado Springs. She used her moment in the spotlight to advocate
that all women train in the art of self-defense, and she began teach-
ing a class of Chicago society women. The necessity of being able to
protect oneself in the city was on the minds of many women who
were pursuing jobs and venturing alone into the urban environment
for the first time. Dr. Maude Glascow, a New York physician, was
also a firm believer in the necessity of self-defense training for
women. After hearing Berger’s story, Glascow argued that “girls
should be taught boxing so that they may be qualified to defend
themselves against attacks by men, which have become so common
of late. Woman has the same weapons for defending herself that
man has, and a little instruction in the manner of using them
would enable her to beat off brutal assailants.”4 The ideas espoused

2
“Girl Whose Skill in Jiu Jitsu Enabled Her to Overcome Robber,” Chicago Daily
Tribune, Apr. 5, 1909, 3; Girl’s Wit and Jiu Jitsu Land Masher on His Back,”
Chicago Daily Tribune, Apr. 4, 1909, 3; “She Routed a Footpad, but Not Cupid,”
Chicago Daily Tribune, June 24, 1912, 7.
3
After Berger successfully thwarted the attacker, disbelieving policemen asked for a
demonstration. Much to their amusement, Berger offered a brief tutorial of her tech-
nique on Detective Frank Gard, as a few reporters watched in astonishment. Berger
even received letters from adoring male admirers who offered proposals of mar-
riage. She politely declined these requests. Ibid.; “Social Sets of Other Cities,”
Washington Post, Sept. 10, 1909, 7.
4
“Doubt If Women Boxers Will Ever Be Numerous,” Chicago Daily Tribune, Aug. 26,
1909, 11.

The Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era | 13:4 Oct. 2014 471
 by Berger and Glascow reflect a broader trend among women in the
Progressive Era to empower not only their minds, but also their
bodies in a larger campaign for social and political equality. These
exceptional women sought to go beyond words and use their bodies
as weapons in the battle to upend the existing hierarchy and claim
their rights to exist in both the private and public spheres, free of
harassment.5

In the post second-wave feminist world, physical self-defense train-

ing for the purpose of female personal and political empowerment
might not seem like such a revolutionary idea. In the 1960s and
1970s feminists openly advocated that women prepare themselves
physically, psychologically, and politically to defend themselves
against outside threats. Women flocked to self-defense classes that
offered training in the physical and psychological skills to fight off
muggers, rapists, and violent family members. The self-defense
movement, as it came to be called, represented a way for women
to physically express their independence and was part of a larger
feminist movement to combat violence and achieve self-
determination for women. Patricia Searles and Ronald Berger,
when examining the radical roots of the movement in the second
wave, argued that the feminist self-defense movement offered “an
alternative view of women as strong, capable, and self-reliant.”
The movement countered “the traditional patriarchal family struc-
ture that emphasizes women’s passivity, deference, and dependence
on men.”6 Self-defense classes came to symbolize the feminist quest
for liberation in the radical second wave.

5
On family violence and women’s empowerment in the age of industrialization, see
Elizabeth H. Pleck, Domestic Tyranny: The Making of American Social Policy against
Family Violence from Colonial Times to the Present (Urbana, 2004); Linda Gordon,
Heroes of Their Own Lives: The Politics and History of Family Violence (Urbana, 2002);
Del Martin, Battered Wives (San Francisco, 1976); Martha May, “The ‘Problem of
Duty’: Family Desertion in the Progressive Era,” Social Service Review 62 (Mar.
1988): 40–60; Robyn Muncy, Creating a Female Dominion in American Reform,
1890–1935 (New York, 1994); Michael McGerr, A Fierce Discontent: The Rise and
Fall of the Progressive Movement in America, 1870–1920 (New York, 2005). For the de-
bate on women’s rights versus obligations in the public sphere, see Linda K. Kerber,
No Constitutional Right to be Ladies: Women and the Obligations of Citizenship
(New York, 1999).
6
Patricia Searles and Ronald J. Berger, “The Feminist Self-Defense Movement: A
Case Study,” Gender and Society 1 (Mar. 1987): 79. On women’s empowerment
through radical feminism in the 1960s and 1970s, see Alice Echols, Daring to Be
Bad: Radical Feminism in America, 1967–1975 (St. Paul, 1989); Sara Evans, Personal
Politics: The Roots of Women’s Liberation in the Civil Rights Movement and the New
Left (New York, 1980); Maria Bevacqua, “Reconsidering Violence against

472 | Rouse and Slutsky | Empowering the Physical and Political Self
 Women growing up in the years after the peak of second-wave fem-
inism have seen a revival of self-defense programs, many of which
offer the opportunity to defeat larger-than-life, menacing opponents
in padded attacker uniforms. In these courses, they learn to knee,
elbow, and strike their attackers into submission almost as a rite
of passage that signifies their entry into the adult and very danger-
ous world of femininity. Martha McCaughey conducted an ethno-
graphic study of women in self-defense classes in the early 1990s.
She noted that women undergo a sort of transformation where
they “make their aggression, and the femininity that prevents it,
conscious. They develop a new self-image, a new understanding
of what a female body can do.” In this manner, much as with
second-wave feminism, “the body, then, is not simply the locus of
patriarchal power, ideology, or brutality; it is a potential locus of
resistance.”7 Women who sign up for these classes may not always
consciously realize the feminist implications of their actions. Even
so, scholars such as Kathryn Ziegler argue that these women
“embody feminist politics as a method of resisting traditional, patri-
archal norms of women being passive, submissive, and potentially
victimized by men.”8 McCaughey insisted that their actions are
significant in that female self-defense practitioners “enact the decon-
struction of femininity” and the reconstruction of an image of
women as strong, powerful and capable.9

It should come as no surprise to us then, that women in the Gilded

Age and Progressive Era similarly found a way to make the political
physical through empowering their bodies. Few scholars, however,
have specifically examined or even acknowledged the efforts of this
pioneering generation of feminists in pursuing boxing and jiu-jitsu
as a means not only of self-defense but also of expressing their

Women: Coalition Politics in the Anti-Rape Movement” in Feminist Coalitions:

Historical Perspectives on Second-Wave Feminism in the United States, ed. Stephanie
Gilmore and Sara Evans (Urbana, 2008); Bevacqua, Rape on The Public Agenda:
Feminism and the Politics of Sexual Assault (Boston, 2000); Ruth Rosen, The World
Split Open: How the Modern Women’s Movement Changed America, rev. ed.
(New York, 2006).
7
Martha McCaughey, “The Fighting Spirit: Women’s Self-Defense Training and the
Discourse of Sexed Embodiment,” Gender and Society 12 (June 1998): 281. See also
Sara Evans, Tidal Wave: How Women Changed America at Century’s End (New York,
2004).
8
Kathryn A. Ziegler, “‘Formidable-Femininity’: Performing Gender and Third Wave
Feminism in a Women’s Self Defense Class” (PhD diss., Southern Illinois University
Carbondale, 2008), 18.
9
Martha McCaughey, “The Fighting Spirit: Women’s Self-Defense Training and the
Discourse of Sexed Embodiment,” Gender and Society 12 (June 1998): 281.

The Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era | 13:4 Oct. 2014 473
 personal and political power.10 We already know the stories of how
militant suffragettes, especially in Great Britain, used their bodies in
order to convey their discontent and resist oppression through
marches, pickets, and hunger strikes. Many of these women also ad-
vocated using their bodies not only as an exhibition of women’s
strength but also as a weapon in their political struggle. Yet, perhaps
just as important, even average women, with no direct association to
suffrage organizations, expressed their newfound sense of freedom
through physical training. Theater arts professor Diana Looser, in
her study of female practitioners of jiu-jitsu in the early twentieth
century, argues that these women “were attracted not only to the
arts’ literal defensive potential, but to the ways in which the demon-
stration of women’s physical equality might have symbolic signifi-
cance and wider practical applications at a time when women’s
campaigns for greater political rights and social freedoms were be-
coming increasingly visible.”11

This article expands on Looser’s framework to consider the ways in

which women between the 1880s and 1920s empowered their bodies
to fight violent stranger assaults, political disfranchisement, and
family violence through their training in the “manly art” of self-
defense. Self-defense training armed women with the physical skills
they needed to defend themselves from attacks—or at least their fear
of attack—on the streets as they negotiated their place in the public
space of the city. Training in the traditionally masculine arts of self-
defense also served as an explicit form of political protest for those
who pursued feminist agendas. For some, self-defense training was
especially personal, providing them with techniques to protect
against abuse in their own homes. By subverting the status quo,
they hoped to literally and figuratively challenge the patriarchal
power structure that prevented them from claiming their equal
rights as citizens and human beings.

10
For scholarship on various strategies in the suffrage movement involving the body
and otherwise, see Aileen Kraditor, The Ideas of The Woman Suffrage Movement
(New York, 1981); Ellen Carol Du Bois, Feminism and Suffrage: The Emergence of an
Independent Women’s Movement in America, 1848–1869 (Ithaca, 1999); Katherine H.
Adams and Michael L. Keene, Alice Paul and the American Suffrage Campaign
(Urbana, 2007); Marjorie Spruill Wheeler, One Woman One Vote: Rediscovering the
Women’s Suffrage Movement (New York, 1995); Eleanor Flexner, Century of Struggle:
The Woman’s Rights Movement in the United States, rev. ed. (Cambridge, MA, 1975).
11
Diana Looser, “Radical Bodies and Dangerous Ladies: Martial Arts and Women’s
Performance, 1900–1918,” Theatre Research International 36 (Mar. 2010): 3.

474 | Rouse and Slutsky | Empowering the Physical and Political Self
 The Emergence of Women’s Self-Defense Training
Women’s self-defense training appears to have gained its popularity
from the emerging interest in physical culture in the last decades of
the nineteenth century. Justified as a way of fulfilling a number of
goals—from promoting the body of mothers to maintaining a
healthy younger female physique—women’s sports and awareness
of the female body as an acceptable site of physical exercise became
increasingly popular around the turn of the century.12 Women
across the country eagerly began practicing a range of sports from
tennis and cycling to the more controversial sports of boxing and
jiu-jitsu.

Harrie Irving Hancock published a series of books that encouraged

women and children to study jiu-jitsu for health benefits. Hancock’s
three books described exercises and techniques for men, women,
and children. In Physical Training for Women by Japanese Methods,
Hancock argued that jiu-jitsu could strengthen women’s bodies at
the same time it prevented obesity. More than that, Hancock assert-
ed the radical and anti-Victorian notion that physical training in
martial arts challenged gender stereotypes of women as weak.
“One of the phrases that should be stricken from the English lan-
guage is, ‘the weaker sex,’” he wrote. “After a long experience in
Japanese athletics the writer has no patience with women who con-
sider that merely because of their sex they should be weaker than
men. In Japan the women are not weaker, and in this country
they have no right to be.”13 Hancock’s call to action was significant
in that he insisted that women eagerly embrace martial art training
as a way of expressing their newfound place in society: “The day
has gone by when women prize weakness as a dainty attribute of
their sex, and the science of jiu-jitsu points out the path for the
new physical woman to pursue.”14 Seemingly ahead of his time
for gender norms, Hancock encouraged American women to

12
Martha H. Verbrugge, Active Bodies: A History of Women’s Physical Education in
Twentieth-Century America (New York, 2012); Gregory Kent Stanley, The Rise and
Fall of the Sportswoman: Women’s Health, Fitness, and Athletics, 1860–1940
(New York, 1996); Allan Guttman, Women’s Sports: A History (New York, 1991);
Shannon Leigh Walsh, “Muscular Maternity: Progressive Era Physical Culture,
Biopolitics, and Performance” (PhD diss., University of Minnesota, 2011); Michael
Anton Budd, The Sculpture Machine: Physical Culture and Body Politics in the Age of
Empire (New York, 1997).
13
Harrie Irving Hancock, Physical Training for Women by Japanese Methods (New York,
1905), xi, 1.
14
Ibid., xi.

The Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era | 13:4 Oct. 2014 475
 adopt Asian physical culture as a way to strengthen their bodies and
bolster their sense of selves.

Boxing was also heralded as having a wide range of health and practical
benefits for women. The Washington Post announced in 1904 that the
“Boxing Girl” has arrived. Anticipating the comments of critics, the au-
thor deemphasized the inherent violence in women’s boxing training
and focused instead on the potential health and beauty benefits of
exercise of any kind. Physical fitness leaders reinvented and painted
women’s boxing in a much more feminine light. The “Boxing Girl”
author insisted that by training in gyms and at home, women would
avoid the brutality of competition fighting. The article highlighted
the health advantages of boxing for women by explaining that the
exercise tones and strengthens muscles while combatting weight
gain. This focus on the femininity of the exercises justified women’s
participation in an activity previously limited to the male sphere.15

Still, some critics vehemently denounced women’s participation in

these sports. Their arguments focused on deep-seated concerns
about the masculine nature of boxing and jiu-jitsu and their poten-
tial to defeminize women and disrupt the “natural order.” In 1901,
Reverend William Short of St. Peter’s Episcopal Church, addressing
graduates from the Mary Institute, a school for girls in St. Louis,
denounced what he perceived as “masculine affections” in
women. He insisted that women who attempt to exercise the
“privileges and powers of man, social, political, and otherwise . . .
are directing their efforts to develop in woman a sort of self-
assertiveness and independence and to break down certain barriers
of distinction between the sexes.” He further argued, “This imitation
of mannish manners and masculine methods is simply vulgar.”
Short condemned athletic clubs that trained girls in boxing as unla-
dylike and “bordering on the indecent.”16 This attitude opposing fe-
male self-defense training remained strong among professionals.17
Ten years later, when Dr. Everett Beach, athletic director of the
Los Angeles high schools, decided to ban boxing for girls at Los
Angeles High School, he justified his decision by arguing that “it
was not the aim of instructors to turn out a generation of feminine
fighters, and there was no desire to develop an unnaturally combat-
ive disposition, ‘which would interfere with the natural laws of the

15
“Boxing Girl Arrives,” Washington Post, Oct. 30, 1904, S4.
16
“Emphasizes Opposition to Athletics for Women,” St. Louis Republic, June 24, 1901.
17
See also “Football, Boxing, Cycling Harmful to Women,” Washington Post, Nov. 20,
1921, 68; Edith E. Moriarty, “As a Woman Thinks,” Tulsa Daily World, July 31, 1920, 6.

476 | Rouse and Slutsky | Empowering the Physical and Political Self
 Figure 1. The desire to learn self-defense and improve their health en-
couraged many women to pay fighters to teach them boxing. Nixola Greeley
Smith, “Women Pay Prize Fighters $25 for Boxing Lessons!” Day Book
(Chicago), Mar. 4, 1915. Courtesy of Chronicling America, Library of Congress,
http://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov.

home.’” After the ban, two female students—Fern Powell and

Lauretta Davlin—expressed their intense disappointment. Both
girls had been training in boxing for several months and found
themselves “quite infatuated with the sport.” However, Beach insist-
ed the ban was intended for their benefit. “Suppose a pretty girl’s
nose was broken while boxing,” said Beach. “It probably would
mean permanent disfigurement, and might seriously injure her so-
cial prospects.”18 Thus, Beach defended his decision by arguing
that he was protecting young women physically as well as socially
from the dangers of violent sport.

18
“Ban on Boxing of High School Girls,” San Francisco Call, Dec. 28, 1911, 11.

The Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era | 13:4 Oct. 2014 477
 Figure 2. This ad for the Yabe School of Jiu-Jitsu in Rochester, New York, prom-
ised to equip women with the necessary techniques to protect them from dan-
gers on the street. “Safe from Attack.” Cosmopolitan 39, May–October 1905.
Courtesy of Google Books.

Ignoring the critics who told them that their bodies and natures
were not intended for violence, female practitioners of self-defense
continued to pursue these “masculine methods” with much interest
and intensity in ways that challenged the “natural laws of the
home.” Increasingly, women recognized self-defense as a means
of defending themselves from potential attackers. Advertisements
for jiu-jitsu and boxing classes flooded popular national magazines.
Magazines such as Lippincott’s and The Cosmopolitan advertised self-
defense classes for women at the Yabe School of Jiu-Jitsu in
Rochester, New York. The ads insisted, “As a means of self-defense,
the man or woman versed in JIU-JITSU can protect themselves
against persons twice their size and strength.”19 Initially, popular
magazines and newspapers described the study of self-defense as
a “fad,” especially among society women who could afford to hire

“Size Doesn’t Count If You Know Jiu-Jitsu,” Lippincott’s Monthly Magazine, July–
19

Dec. 1904, advertiser section, 111.

478 | Rouse and Slutsky | Empowering the Physical and Political Self
 private instructors.20 However, it appears to have been much more
than a fad.

The rising popularity of jiu-jitsu and boxing classes is evident in the

array of women who eagerly signed up for training.21 In 1904, the
women of Wesley Methodist Church in Chicago formed their own
jiu-jitsu classes. Motivated less by a desire to improve their health
and more by a concern about arming themselves with techniques
to prevent victimization, the church ladies advocated carrying cay-
enne pepper as a means of defense against potential attackers.22
Young women also signed up for lessons in self-defense on college
campuses, as evidenced by images of Temple University girls prac-
ticing boxing and jiu-jitsu.23 In 1914, fifty Spokane girls at Lewis and
Clark High School enrolled in a self-defense class where the instruc-
tor, Jack Carnahan, insisted that they would learn techniques to stop
attackers. “The girls believe that a couple of short hooks to the jaw, a
jab from a skillfully handled umbrella, or a forced back flip on a
hard pavement will do much more than moral suasion to repulse
unwelcome attentions,” Carnahan remarked.24 By 1920, more than
200 girls were reported studying boxing at the Albert Barnes Club
in Philadelphia.25

Although the expense of paying for lessons may have been prohib-
itive for working-class women, the practice of self-defense was not
necessarily limited to women of the upper class. For those without
the time or money to spend on costly lessons, the Yabe School
offered free lessons through the mail. A few simple techniques
would enable “a little woman to overthrow a big, powerful man,”
affording “sure protection from attack by thieves and thugs.”26
Newspapers published articles and illustrations that detailed
step-by-step jiu-jitsu techniques to fend off a variety of potential at-
tack situations. Women who could not pay for lessons might begin
their own program of home training. Articles targeting female

20
“Boxing to Be a Fad for Women,” Chicago Daily Tribune, Oct. 26, 1902, 48; “Boxing
Girl Arrives,” Washington Post, Oct. 30, 1904, S4.
21
“Girls Take to Boxing,” Los Angeles Times, July 15, 1915, III1; “Urges Boxing in All
Schools as Truancy Cure,” Chicago Daily Tribune, Nov. 11, 1920, 17.
22
“Roused to Curb Crime Carnival,” Chicago Daily Tribune, Feb. 25, 1906, 1.
23
“Notice to Highway Men” and “Clever in the Art of Jujutsu,” Philadelphia Evening
Public Ledger, May 10, 1920.
24
“Fifty Girls of Spokane Train to Whip Mashers,” Washington Post, Dec. 26, 1914, 4.
25
“Girls of Philly Have Boxing Club All of their Own,” San Francisco Chronicle, Feb.
17, 1920, 14.
26
“Safe from Attack,” Cosmopolitan, vol. 39, May–October 1905 (New York, 1905).

The Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era | 13:4 Oct. 2014 479
 readers were intended to enable women to teach themselves in the
privacy of their own homes.27

Books offered more in-depth tutorials on how women could private-

ly prepare for defensive combat. A number of authors besides
Harrie Irving Hancock published training manuals for women. In
1904 Harry Hall Skinner insisted that the purpose of his book,
Jiu-Jitsu, was to teach any man or woman how to “defeat a more
powerful assailant.”28 Emily Watts, a wealthy English socialite,
started her jiu-jitsu training under the direction of Sadakazu
Uyenishi. By 1906 she had published her own book, The Fine Art
of Jujutsu, and was conducting classes for children. Her work,
which included numerous photographs of herself and her col-
leagues applying their techniques to painful effect, further inspired
more women to take up the study of self-defense.29

Self-defense techniques available from mail-order pamphlets, news-

paper articles, or books not only made training accessible to a wider
range of women, but also apparently had some direct effect for
women who took to heart the messages of instructors who insisted
on the transformative potential of women’s self-defense training. In
October 1905, the New York Times reported an incident where a
woman named Mary Steckler used self-defense techniques she
had read about against a mugger. The assailant grabbed her pocket
book as she was walking through Central Park. Rather than scream
or freeze in terror, she put him in a jiu-jitsu hold. The angered at-
tacker pushed her against a fence and threatened to kill her if she
didn’t give up her possessions. She refused to do so and instead
held him in place until the police arrived. Her cool demeanor sur-
prised the officers when they found her. She explained that she
would never “run from any man of that kind who lives.”
Although she had no formal training in self-defense, she told offi-
cers that every woman should learn jiu-jitsu.30 The practical benefits

27
“If a Bold Man Attacks You, Jiu Jitsu Him,” Chicago Daily Tribune, June 20, 1915,
C1; “JuJutsu A La Movies,” Philadelphia Evening Ledger, June 17, 1916, amusement
section.
28
Harry H. Skinner, Jiu-Jitsu: A Comprehensive and Copiously Illustrated Treatise on the
Wonderful Japanese Method of Attack and Self-Defense (New York, 1904), 7.
29
Emily Watts, The Fine Art of Jujutsu (London, 1906); Joseph R. Svinth, “The
Evolution of Women’s Judo, 1900–1945,” InYo: Journal of Alternative Perspectives
(Feb. 2001), http://ejmas.com/jalt/jaltart_svinth_0201.htm (accessed June 16, 2014);
Looser; “Radical Bodies and Dangerous Ladies,” 9.
30
“Woman Grabs Highwayman,” New York Times, Oct. 21, 1905, 1. Ten days later the
New York Times reported that Emelie Marten used jiu-jitsu on a man who followed
her on her walk home. When he approached and winked at her she did not wait to

480 | Rouse and Slutsky | Empowering the Physical and Political Self
 of self-defense proved an effective motivator. The trend of women’s
self-defense training was spurred on not only by a new fascination
with physical culture, but also by fears of the dangers that faced
women as they moved into the public realm.

Self-Defense Training and Women in the Public Sphere

Women’s self-defense training also emerged from a concern for wom-
en’s safety as they stepped out of the protected domestic sphere and
into the public sphere of the city. Rapid immigration, urbanization,
and industrialization fueled anxieties about shifting social and gender
norms. The presence of women in public generated cultural anxiety,
as it challenged notions of separate spheres. The possibility that
men would view these women in sexualized ways threatened the
reputation of respectable women.31 Beginning in the late nineteenth
century, newspapers offered accounts of the perils that awaited unes-
corted women who ventured into cities by themselves. Reporters de-
tailed dangerous encounters between women and “mashers,” a slang
term used to describe men who make unwelcome sexual advances to-
ward women. Some major cities such as Chicago and New York even
trained female police officers to provide additional protection for
women. These policewomen studied both armed and unarmed com-
bat.32 By the 1920s, the New York Police Department had apparently
decided that the masher threat was so out of control that it warranted
extra attention from the women’s squad in the form of undercover
sting operations. Mary Hamilton, chief of the New York women’s
squad, insisted that “many persons do not realize how serious [the
masher threat] is.” Hamilton insisted that daily complaints from vic-
tims warranted swift action. Female officers trained in jiu-jitsu
worked undercover to identify and arrest men who harassed
women on the streets. Once convicted, the offender could serve up
to six months in prison.33

ask his intentions, instead “she caught the man by the lapel of his coat with one
hand, and with the other had seized one wrist, then with a quick twist she threw
him.” When the man stood up and tried to speak she put him on the ground
again. He did not dare attempt to approach her again but instead ran away as
fast as he could. “An Insulter Jiu Jitsued,” New York Times, Oct. 31, 1905, 7.
31
Jessica Ellen Sewell, Women and the Everyday City: Public Space in San Francisco,
1890–1915 (Minneapolis, 2011), xxiii.
32
“Policewomen Apt Pupils with Pistols and Jiu Jitsu,” Chicago Daily Tribune, Mar.
10, 1914, 15; “Police Women to Wrestle,” New York Times, Mar. 8, 1914, C5.
33
“Women Police Grapple with the Masher Evil,” New York Times, Mar. 23, 1924,
xxii.

The Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era | 13:4 Oct. 2014 481
 The extent of the actual versus the perceived threat of violence to
women in cities is a subject of debate. At the time, some women
publicly challenged the popular conception of the “masher” threat
and accused the media of exaggerating the dangers of the city for
dramatic effect. One female doctor who frequented the streets at
all hours in the course of her duties posed the question to other
female workers of whether or not “there is any such thing as a
real masher?” She told reporters from the Washington Post, “I’ve
been a doctor for twenty years, out at all hours and in all parts of
town, and I’ve never met a masher.”34 Historians have suggested,
however, that late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century cities
were indeed dangerous places. Jeffrey Adler’s study of violence in
Chicago concluded that the city had one of the highest homicide
rates in the nation.35 The idea that the modern world was a danger-
ous place for women was a theme that reflected larger concerns
about industrialization, urbanization, and immigration. Whether
these fears were warranted or not, economic and social change dis-
rupted the existing social order and proved potentially threatening,
especially as women’s roles expanded and they moved increasingly
into the public sphere.

Women who engaged in self-defense training confronted their per-

ceived unsafe world head-on, thereby claiming public spaces as
their own.36 In 1889, the Los Angeles Times announced the opening
of an athletic club for women in the city. The reporter insisted
that the training of women in self-defense was essential to protect
them from mashers. At a time when most women considered it
socially unacceptable for men to speak to them in public, the specter
of physical assault and especially rape engendered so much fear that
it made the radical idea of female physical empowerment seem less
threatening. One mother explained that she would feel more com-
fortable knowing that her three daughters were physically capable
of defending themselves. “Our girls would not be insulted so
often on the streets,” she asserted, “if the brainless puppies who

34
“Women Who Find the Streets Safe,” Washington Post, Nov. 5, 1905, SM7.
35
Jeffrey Adler, First in Violence, Deepest in Dirt: Homicide in Chicago, 1875–1920
(Cambridge, MA, 2006).
36
On women and public space in the urban environment, see Sarah Deutsch, Women
and the City: Gender, Space, and Power in Boston, 1876–1940 (New York, 2000); Kathy
Peiss, Cheap Amusements: Working Women and Leisure in Turn-of-the-Century New York
(Philadelphia, 1986); Mary Ryan, Women in Public: Between Banners and Ballots, 1825–
1880 (Baltimore, 1990); Sewell, Women and the Everyday City; Daphne Spain, How
Women Saved the City (Minneapolis, 2001); Christine Stansell, City of Women: Sex
and Class in New York, 1789–1860 (repr. Urbana, 1987).

482 | Rouse and Slutsky | Empowering the Physical and Political Self
 Figure 3. Newspapers published articles and illustrations that promised to teach
women techniques that reveal “how even women of slight build can overcome
and subdue a burly assailant.” Illustration to Edna Egan, “Every Woman Her
Own Bodyguard.” Ogden Standard, Magazine Section, July 14, 1917. Courtesy
of Chronicling America, Library of Congress, http://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov.

make a business of annoying unprotected females know that our

girls can strike out from the shoulder with telling effect.” She further
argued, “The average women of today, except in England and some
of the Eastern States, are as helpless as infants when they are alone;
but how different it would be if they were taught the science of self-
defense.”37 This mother viewed self-defense training as enabling her
daughters to stand up for themselves against male aggressors and
assert their right to walk down public streets safely.

Stories of women successfully fending off violent assaults fueled the

trend of female self-defense training. Sordid tales of women’s vic-
timization appeared in print media along with successful accounts
of brave women fighting back through their own will and power.
Newspapers reported that Blanche Bates fought off an attacker in
the streets of New York in 1901. Bates credited her boxing training
for her success in defending herself: “I would not advocate any
woman going through life leaving behind a trail of bruised mascu-
linity in her wake, but if a man insults her, she ought to know where
to use her fist on him where it will do the most good.” Bates insisted

37
“Athletic Women,” Los Angeles Times, Apr. 28, 1889, 6.

The Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era | 13:4 Oct. 2014 483
 that all women should be able to protect themselves from such
insults by training in self-defense.38 In 1902, the Washington Times
reported another self-defense success story. A nineteen-year-old
Pennsylvania girl was approached by a robber who refused to listen
when she insisted that he leave her alone. She punched him on the
jaw so hard that he landed on the grass behind him. The girl ex-
plained to reporters that she had studied boxing. Her success in
debilitating her attacker offered further proof of the benefits of
this type of training for women. The newspaper reporter reiterated
a common theme about the dangers of the modern world when he
wrote, “It is an unfortunate fact that most country places are not as
safe for lone women as they were a generation ago.” Rather
than suggest that women stay in the home to avoid these dangers,
the reporter concluded instead that “it might be a good thing if
more of them [women] were prepared to defend themselves.”39
This idea of physical empowerment, although radical in its
time, was part of a larger Progressive Era conversation about
enabling women to navigate the potentially dangerous urban
environment.

Self-Defense Training as Political Empowerment

Some women also recognized that training in boxing and jiu-jitsu
had benefits extending beyond preparing to defend themselves
against physical attack. Women’s self-defense training had potential
political implications as well. It is well known that Theodore
Roosevelt eagerly advocated physical culture as a means not only
of fighting emasculation and strengthening the bodies and the char-
acters of American men, but as a way of strengthening the virility of
the nation as a whole. Roosevelt sought to emulate these attributes
by pursuing a variety of athletics, including boxing and jiu-jitsu.40
Less well known is the fact that several elite Washington women de-
termined to prove that they could take on any physical challenge
that the president could in an effort to challenge preconceived no-
tions of feminine weakness.

In 1904, when the president heard that prominent judo instructor

Yoshiaki Yamashita was visiting the United States, he invited

38
“Girls Should Be Boxers,” Seattle Star, May 28, 1901, 3.
39
“Self-Defense for Women,” Washington Times, Aug. 29, 1902, 6.
40
Gail Bederman, Manliness and Civilization: A Cultural History of Gender and Race in
the United States, 1880–1917 (Chicago, 1995), 193; Sarah Watts, Rough Rider in the
White House: Theodore Roosevelt and the Politics of Desire (Chicago, 2003), 46–47;
Kristin Hoganson, Fighting for American Manhoood: How Gender Politics Provoked the
Spanish-American and Philippine-American Wars (New Haven, 1998).

484 | Rouse and Slutsky | Empowering the Physical and Political Self
 Yamashita to Washington to offer instruction.41 Roosevelt saw the
training as a way of reducing his weight and of garnering media
attention and popular support in an election year. Martha Blow
Wadsworth, a wealthy Washington heiress, was upset by
Roosevelt’s blatant political maneuverings and use of jiu-jitsu to
elicit public attention. According to martial art historian Joseph
Svinth, Wadsworth despised Roosevelt “so much that she insisted
on duplicating virtually every physical feat he claimed, once riding
a relay of fast horses several hundred miles in 24 hours just to spite
him.” Wadsworth determined to organize a judo class for women
and girls under the direction of Yamashita’s wife, Fude. Students
in the class soon included the wives and daughters of prominent
Washington businessmen and politicians including Maria Louise
“Hallie” Davis Elkins (wife of Senator Stephen Elkins) and her
daughter Katherine Elkins, Grace Davis Lee (Hallie’s sister), Jessie
Ames (daughter of a former Civil War general and politician), and
Re Lewis Smith Wilmer (wife of prominent Washington surgeon
William Holland Wilmer).42 The class for young girls included
Katherine Brown, Frances Moore, Ogden Jones, and Margaret
Perrin. Newspapers highlighted not only the social status of these
women, but also their athleticism as a sign of the changing roles
of women.

This new generation of women embraced judo not simply for phys-
ical exercise or to protect against potential mashers, but as a means
to secure broader freedoms for themselves and for their daughters.
An article in the San Francisco Chronicle noted that Katherine Elkins,
one of the young participants in Fude’s class, also excelled in a va-
riety of sports.43 Elite women who entered the physical arena found

41
It is important to note that Yamashita taught Roosevelt judo, which was a deriv-
ative of Japanese jiu-jitsu created by Jigoro Kano in 1882. Judo concentrated on the
philosophical aspects of martial arts training, with an emphasis on the improvement
of self and society. Kano also revised many jiu-jitsu techniques to improve upon
their effectiveness and efficiency. Most Americans at the time made no distinction
between judo and jiu-jitsu. Throughout this article, we refer generically to the
Japanese martial arts introduced in America as jiu-jitsu, although sometimes the
specific practitioners and techniques may have actually been teaching and sharing
the art of judo. Rarely was this distinction made in the accounts from the era.
42
Joseph R. Svinth, “Professor Yamashita Goes to Washington.” Martial Arts in the
Modern World, ed. Thomas A Green and Joseph R. Svinth (Westport, CT, 2003),
52–55; Joseph R. Svinth, “Jiu-Jitsu for Women: Annotations,” http://ejmas.
com/jalt/jaltart_sandow's_0800.htm (accessed June 16, 2014); Svinth, “The
Evolution of Women’s Judo, 1900–1945.”
43
“A Japanese Woman Teaching American Girls,” San Francisco Chronicle, June 5,
1904, 5.

The Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era | 13:4 Oct. 2014 485
 Figure 4. A children’s class taught by Yoshiaki Yamashita for well-to-do
Washingtonians in 1904. From Yoshiaki Yamashita Photograph Album (PH
006), courtesy Special Collections and University Archives, W.E B. Du Bois
Library, University of Massachusetts Amherst, http://www.library.umass.
edu/spcoll/ead/muph006.html.

a way to balance the bodily, social, and cultural components of this

new gendered identity. For example, one of the women told report-
ers, “I did not go into it to benefit myself physically. I went into it for
the knowledge, and for the wonderful power which that knowledge
gives.”44 These elite women used their power to challenge the very
definition of the “manly arts” by seizing for themselves the sense of
liberation offered through self-defense training and converting it
into a “womanly art.”

The women who publicly practiced judo on the lawn of the White
House clearly recognized their appropriation of the manly arts as
signaling women’s new role in the political arena. Some led suffrage
organizations, thus exposing the tangible connections between
physical and political empowerment in the Progressive Era. One

44
“A Japanese Woman Teaching American Girls,” San Francisco Chronicle, June 5,
1904, 5.

486 | Rouse and Slutsky | Empowering the Physical and Political Self
 of the noted female jiu-jitsu practitioners and guests of President
Roosevelt, Jessie Ames (1882–1967), came from a politically connect-
ed family and was a noted political activist in her own right. Ames’s
father had been a Reconstruction-era governor and senator from
Mississippi but then moved back to New England, where the family
earned a fortune in flour milling. The children of this politically
prominent family all established themselves as reform-minded pro-
fessionals. In her later life, Jessie Ames worked for female freedom,
most notably through the birth control movement.45 Her sister took
it a step further. Blanche Ames, a class of 1899 Smith graduate, led
the Birth Control League and Woman Suffrage League of
Massachusetts in the 1910s. Indeed, the Ames sisters’ advocacy re-
veals the connections that such club and elite women saw between
political and personal independence.

The example of the Washington women inspired others to take up

self-defense training. As women continued to pursue the study of
boxing and jiu-jitsu, critics softened their tone, favoring sarcasm
or humor to outright condemnation. When the University of
Illinois announced the introduction of boxing classes for women, a
reporter declared it a “good thing” and then sarcastically added,
“A man naturally wants a wife who is able to protect him from in-
sult.”46 The juxtaposition of gender roles in this statement was in-
tended not only as humorous commentary regarding women’s
entry into the world of athletics, but also as commentary about
women’s advances in the political realm.

Although not all women embraced the links of their new physical
abilities with women’s new political and social freedom, there
were clear connections. In 1912, Ethel Intropodi, a trained boxer, in-
sisted that she had decided to study boxing in Chicago for personal
rather than specific political reasons: “I am not a suffragette nor
even a suffragist; but I do believe that a woman should be able to
protect herself from that breed of brutes commonly known as mash-
ers.” Intropodi insisted that women did not need to be weak, run-
ning away and screaming to a policeman. Instead, she insisted
that a “girl of spunk and independence is able to take care of herself.

45
Jessie Ames Marshall, ed., Chronicles from the Nineteenth Century: Family Letters of
Blanche Butler and Adelbert Ames (privately published, 1957); Anne Biller Clark,
My Dear Mrs. Ames: A Study of the Life of Suffragist, Cartoonist and Birth Control
Reformer, Blanche Ames Ames, 1878–1969 (Amherst, MA, 1996). On the Ames sisters’
involvement in the birth control movement, see Jean Baker, Margaret Sanger: A Life of
Passion (New York, 2011), 213.
46
“Boxing Classes for Women,” New York Tribune, Nov. 2, 1922, 14.

The Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era | 13:4 Oct. 2014 487
 If she can land a stinging blow behind the ear on one of these mash-
ers, she is safe. If she can deliver a strong upper cut, or lead a ‘solar
plexus’ blow, she can walk the streets unmolested and unafraid.”
She went on to explain that not only is boxing healthy, but it
“gives a woman a feeling of power that is exhilarating.”47
Although Intropodi declined to identify herself as a feminist, she
recognized the potential for physical empowerment of women
through self-defense training. Through the assertion that women
have the right to physically fight back against mashers and to safely
walk the public streets, the practice of self-defense in itself became a
form of political activism. Thus, although some women insisted that
they studied self-defense simply for health or exercise, the entrance
of women into the male-dominated field of self-defense had political
implications that both reflected and shaped new attitudes by and to-
ward women.

The link between self-defense for physical and political empower-

ment became explicit with the militant suffragettes of England.
Jiu-jitsu had become popular among women in England as well as
in America.48 Employing more militant tactics than Americans,
British women seeking the vote confronted men through direct ac-
tion. Women such as Emmeline Pankurst and Mary Richardson
went on hunger strikes, hurled objects at buildings and people, set
fire to structures, and used their bodies as sites of protest to demon-
strate for political rights. In this more radical context, self-defense
training took on a more explicit political meaning. By 1909, Edith
Garrud, who had studied under Sadakazu Uyenshi in England,
was teaching jiu-jitsu to members of the Women’s Social and
Political Union (WPSU). These women explicitly pursued jiu-jitsu
to protect themselves and WPSU leaders from assaults not by crim-
inals but rowdy anti-suffragettes and the police.49 This group of

47
“Smashing Cures Mashing Says Ethel Intropodi; Look at Her,” Tacoma Times, Sept.
9, 1912, 2.
48
“Englishmen Learn Japanese Wrestling,” Richmond Times-Dispatch, Magazine
Section, Apr. 10, 1904, 7C. On the British suffrage movement, see Susan Kingsley
Kent, Sex and Suffrage in Britain, 1860–1914 (New York, 1990); Laura Nym
Mayhall, The Militant Suffrage Movement: Citizenship and Resistance in Britain, 1860–
1930 (New York, 2003); Janice E. Ruth and Evelyn Sinclair, Women of the Suffrage
Movement (New York, 2006); Harold L. Smith, The British Women’s Suffrage
Campaign: 1866–1928, 2nd ed. (New York, 2007).
49
Svinth, “The Evolution of Women’s Judo.” “Washing Makes Suffragist,” New York
Times, Apr. 11, 1909, C3; Tony Wolf, “The Jujitsuffragettes: Jujitsu and Feminism in
Early 1900s England,” http://www.bullshido.net/forums/showthread.php?t=31540
(accessed June 17, 2014); Looser, “Radical Bodies and Dangerous Ladies,” 9;
“Woman Physically Militant: Suffragette, Learns Jiu-Jitsu to Eject Male Intruders,”

488 | Rouse and Slutsky | Empowering the Physical and Political Self
 Figure 5. Women who trained in the “manly art” of boxing found the physical-
ity of the sport liberating. “A Left Hand Cross Counter,” from “Boxing to Be a
Fad for Women.” Chicago Daily Tribune, Oct. 26, 1902, 48. Courtesy of
Chronicling America, Library of Congress, http://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov.

dedicated women had long advocated picketing, hunger strikes,

and the destruction of public property to make their presence
known to a government who refused to listen to their words.
They had already refined the practice of using their bodies as a
means of protest. Jiu-jitsu provided yet another avenue of using
their bodies as a method of remonstrating against the physical
and political oppression of the female body.

Garrud taught the women techniques that allowed them to take con-
trol of situations that they felt were out of their control. A member of
the group explained, “I believe we will teach male rowdies who try
to bother us a lesson. I have already ejected one or two disturbers of
our meetings with a speed and dispatch that has surprised their
lumbering masculine minds.”50 By 1913, the WPSU leaders were
advising all women in the movement to be trained in self-defense.
Sylvia Pankhurst said to a suffragist meeting in Bromley in 1913,
“We have not yet made ourselves a match for the police, and we

Washington Post, July 3, 1910, 4; “Militant for Ballot: English Suffragettes Learning
Art of Jiu-Jitsu,” Washington Post, July 18, 1910, 3.
50
“Suffragettes Train for New Campaign,” San Francisco Chronicle, Aug. 7, 1910, 43.

The Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era | 13:4 Oct. 2014 489
 have got to do it. The police know jiu-jitsu. I advise you to learn jiu-
jitsu. Women should practice it as well as men.” She also advised
the women to always go armed with their sticks to meetings in
case they encountered hostility from outsiders.51 The idea of
armed suffragettes seemed extreme to many critics, who insisted
that the new tactic in no way furthered the cause of women’s suf-
frage. Others simply found it humorous.

Popular magazines and newspapers made light of the situation by

mocking the suffragettes who studied jiu-jitsu. A cartoon published
in Punch in 1910 showed police officers terrified of approaching a
suffragette, who had already disabled several of their colleagues
with jiu-jitsu. The artist included the caption, “The Suffragette that
Knew Jiu-Jitsu,” humorously suggesting that her newfound physical
strength was a force to be reckoned with.52 The patronizing tone of
the cartoon, however, suggests that critics dismissed women’s self-
defense training and therefore the suffrage movement in general.53
Indeed, the media’s sexist portrayal of self-defense practitioners
reflects a broader uncertainty and anxiety about how to make
sense of these women who powerfully stretched the boundaries of
acceptable female behavior.

Seizing on any public attention that came her way, Garrud accepted
many requests from interviewers and offered public demonstrations
to highlight the advantages of self-defense training for all women.
Garrud and her students did not shy away from the press. Rather
they eagerly pursued the publicity. “Woman is exposed to many
perils nowadays,” she argued, “because so many who call them-
selves men are not worthy of that exalted title, and it is her duty
to learn how to defend herself, because ju-jutsu has over and over
again been proved to be the most effective means, in moments of
emergency, for repelling the attack of a ruffian; because it is easy
to learn, and because it is, quite apart from its combative value, a
splendid exercise; it is the very thing for women as well as men to
take up thoroughly.”54 Her comments echoed the arguments

51
“Jiu-Jitsu for Militants,” New York Times, Aug. 20, 1913.
52
“The Suffragette That Knew Jiu-Jitsu,” Punch, or the London Charivari, July 6,
1910, 9.
53
Just as the media in the 1960s and 1970s highlighted portraits and spectacles of
radical feminists to explain and dismiss all feminists as aggressive or unfeminine,
the press in the 1910s reacted to physically empowered women in a similar way.
For media coverage of second-wave feminists, Patricia Bradley, Mass Media and
the Shaping of America Feminism, 1963–1975 (Jackson, MS, 2003).
54
Edith Garrud, “Damsel v. Desperado,” Health & Strength, July 23, 1910, 101–02,

490 | Rouse and Slutsky | Empowering the Physical and Political Self
 Figure 6. Terrified police officers cower in fear of a suffragette armed with the
knowledge of jiu-jitsu. “The Suffragette That Knew Jiu-Jitsu,” Punch, or
the London Charivari, July 6, 1910, 9. Courtesy of the Internet Archive, https://
archive.org/details/punchvol138a139lemouoft.

made by advocates of self-defense for women in the United States.

Indeed some of Garrud’s most radical assertions stemmed from how
she wanted to transform women’s bodies. Resisting the Victorian
notion of the body as a site of weakness and in need of protection,
Garrud and her jiu-jitsu followers suggested that not only should
women learn these techniques to empower themselves, but also
that doing so had political implications. At the same time, Garrud
offered the suffragettes the physical training to fend off physical at-
tacks to their cause.

American suffragists drew inspiration as well from the adoption of

jiu-jitsu by English suffragettes, who deliberately trained to use their
bodies as physical sites of political struggles. American suffrage or-
ganizations apparently did not emulate the militant zeal of their
English cousins by organizing self-defense classes and promoting
public exhibitions. Yet American suffrage leaders did recognize
the connections between physical and political liberation and advo-
cated self-defense for all women. Sofia Loebinger, a leader of a

repr. in the Journal of Non-Lethal Combatives 1 (Dec. 1999), http://ejmas.

com/jnc/jncart_garrud_1299.htm (accessed June 17, 2014).

The Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era | 13:4 Oct. 2014 491
 militant suffragist group in New York, expressed admiration for the
English suffragettes who practiced jiu-jitsu: “Strong situations need
strong women, and I am heartily in favor of the movement.”
Although she admitted that it might not assist them directly in
achieving the right to vote, she argued that “boxing would be a
good thing for women if only to teach them to concentrate their
minds on one thing at a time. The ballot, for instance.”55
Loebinger recognized the transformative potential of physical train-
ing in strengthening women for the political battle that lay ahead.
Moreover, for activists who used confrontational mass resistance
techniques to demonstrate for the vote, arming themselves with
these skills could serve them well on multiple fronts.

In 1915, Professor Emily Putnam used her Vassar anniversary ad-

dress to advocate the training of all women in self-defense.
Putnam had previously served as the first dean of Barnard
College, and in 1910 she published The Lady: Studies of Certain
Significant Phases of Her History. At the time of her Vassar address,
Putnam was a professor of history at Barnard. Putnam offered a
more in-depth feminist analysis that highlighted the broader dan-
gers of gender stereotyping. Putnam decried women’s subordinate
political status in society, while suggesting that items of material
culture such as skirts reinforced the objectification. This rhetoric
would reappear again in feminist discourse fifty years later. For
Putnam, the personal was indeed directly political insofar as cloth-
ing physically restricted a woman’s right to autonomy:

If I might have my way, all girls would be trained to

be manly. They would be stripped of their hampering
dress, which is in itself a badge of physical incompe-
tence. They would be practiced in dangerous sports,
where life and limb depend on nervous control; pub-
lic opinion would require of them the same standard
of physical courage as it requires of boys; they would
not be allowed to cry when they are hurt; the schools
would have courses in not being afraid of things
beginning with mice and progressing through
men-under-the-bed to fire-arms; they would learn
the ordinary arts of self-defense, and in view of
their special liability to attack, would supplement

55
“British Suffragettes Are Going to Take Up Art of Self-Defense,” Milwaukee
Sentinel, Apr. 15, 1911, 14.

492 | Rouse and Slutsky | Empowering the Physical and Political Self
 these with the open carriage of weapons when cir-
cumstances rendered it advisable.56

Beginning by condemning the restricting nature of women’s cloth-

ing as well as the cultural restrictions on women’s behavior that con-
tributed to their development as “physical cowards,” Putnam took
her case even further. Her radical suggestion (as one reporter la-
beled it) that women be trained in self-defense clearly reflected
her belief in the potential of physical training to help women em-
body the political.

Self-Defense Training as Protection against Family Violence

Beyond the political implications of self-defense training, many in-
structors recognized that on a personal level, the study of self-
defense could have revolutionary implications for women who suf-
fered in abusive relationships. Although the issue of family violence
was rarely openly addressed, it nonetheless plagued American fam-
ilies. The popular media focused on violent attacks by mashers or
strangers as the main danger facing American women. But the
real threats of violence were often closer to home. Historian
Jeffrey Adler has revealed that domestic violence was the number
one cause of homicide in early twentieth-century Chicago.57 The po-
lice and court system occasionally intervened in exceptional cases of
abuse, prosecuting husbands for abusing their wives.58 More often,
women seeking escape and protection from family violence turned
to private charities organized by their churches or other Progressive
Era organizations, which offered assistance and shelter to women.
Although not originally intended as domestic violence shelters,
many settlement houses and mission homes intended to rescue
“fallen” women informally served as safe havens for women escap-
ing violent home environments.59 In performing this work that they

56
Emily James Putnam, “Women and Democracy,” The Fiftieth Anniversary of the
Opening of Vassar College, October 10 to 13, 1915, A Record (Poughkeepsie, NY,
1916), 113–14.
57
Adler, First in Violence, Deepest in Dirt, 46.
58
Ibid., 75; “Wife Beating and the Whipping Post,” San Francisco Sunday Call, Jan. 7,
1906, magazine section. On government involvement in issues related to family
violence, see Gordon, Heroes of their Own Lives, and Pleck, Domestic Tyranny.
59
Chicago’s Protective Agency for Women and Children was founded in 1885 to
offer assistance to victims of domestic violence. Adler, First in Violence, Deepest in
Dirt, 76. See also Peggy Pascoe, Relations of Rescue: The Search for Female Moral
Authority in the American West, 1874–1939 (New York, 1993); Joanne Meyerowitz,
Women Adrift: Independent Wage Earners in Chicago, 1880–1930 (Chicago, 1988);
Rush Rosen, The Lost Sisterhood: Prostitution in America, 1900–1918 (Baltimore,
1983); McGerr, A Fierce Discontent; Peiss, Cheap Amusements.

The Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era | 13:4 Oct. 2014 493
 Figure 7. Although many popular magazines and newspapers offered creative
advice on how women could defend themselves from attacks on the street (in
this case using a hatpin as a weapon), the reality was that most violence women
encountered was in the home. From “How to Defend Yourself,” San Francisco
Call, Aug. 21, 1904. Courtesy of Chronicling America, Library of Congress,
http://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov.

viewed as charity, reform-minded middle- and upper-class women

became cognizant of the level of family violence facing American
women.

The leaders of national suffrage organizations were cautious in their

approach to domestic violence for fear of alienating potential sup-
porters in their effort to win the right to vote.60 Moderate suffrage

60
Joanna Bourke, “Sexual Violence, Marital Guidance, and Victorian Bodies: An
Aesthesiology,” Victorian Studies 50 (Spring 2008): 419–36; Hendrick Hartog, Man
and Wife in America (Cambridge, MA, 2000); Jill Hasday, “Contest and Consent: A
Legal History of Marital Rape,” California Law Review 88 (Oct. 2000): 1373–1505;
Elaine Tyler May, Great Expectations: Marriage and Divorce in Post-Victorian America
(Chicago, 1980); Sean T. Moore, “‘Justifiable Provocation’: Violence against

494 | Rouse and Slutsky | Empowering the Physical and Political Self
 leaders recognized that women’s political subordination in the
public sphere went hand-in-hand with their subordination in the
domestic sphere. In the mid-nineteenth century, Elizabeth Cady
Stanton and Lucretia Mott openly condemned violence against
women and used examples of domestic violence to support their
argument for a woman’s right to divorce. Enduring intense criticism
for advocating divorce and accused of attempting to destroy the
stability of American family life, moderate suffrage leaders by the
1890s chose to censor their own speech and focus more narrowly
on women’s suffrage. The movement experienced a sort of rebirth
in the 1890s and 1900s, as National American Woman Suffrage
Association (NAWSA) leaders tapped into changing popular senti-
ment toward woman suffrage and created an efficient political
machine focused on the passage of federal and state suffrage
amendments. Suffrage leaders hoped that once women had
achieved the right to vote, they would be empowered to tackle
other issues, such as violence against women.61

Despite the reluctance of suffrage leaders to broach the subject of

family violence, a number of other organizations did connect
women voting with freedom from violent home lives. The
Women’s Trade Union League (WTUL), for example, had formed
in 1903 to organize female workers but adopted a range of women’s
rights causes in the workplace, at home, and in politics. For the
WTUL and its famed leader, Rose Schneiderman, advocating
protective-labor legislation such as an eight-hour work day, cam-
paigning for the right of women to vote, and combatting wife beat-
ing were all necessary to bring equality to the working class.62
Female leaders of the temperance movement broached the subject

Women in Essex County, New York, 1799–1860,” Journal of Social History 35 (Spring
2002): 889–918; Stephen Robertson, “Seduction, Sexual Violence, and Marriage in
New York City, 1886–1955,” Law and History Review 24 (Summer 2006): 331–73;
Ellen Rothman, Hands and Hearts: A History of Courtship in America (New York,
1984); Carl N. Degler, “What Ought to Be and What Was: Women’s Sexuality in
the Nineteenth Century,” American Historical Review 79 (Dec. 1974): 1467–90.
61
Elizabeth Pleck, “Feminist Responses to ‘Crimes against Women’ 1868–1896,”
Signs 8 (Spring 1983): 458, 470. See also Nancy Cott, Public Vows: A History of
Marriage and the Nation (Cambridge, MA, 2002); Ellen Carol DuBois and Richard
Candida Smith, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Feminist as Thinker: A Reader in Documents
and Essays (New York, 2007); Sara Hunter Graham, Woman Suffrage and the New
Democracy (New Haven, 1996), 149.
62
Annelise Orleck, Common Sense and a Little Fire: Women and Working-Class Politics in
the United States, 1900–1965 (Chapel Hill, 1995); Elizabeth Anne Payne, Reform,
Labor, and Feminism: Margaret Dreier Robins and the Women’s Trade Union League
(Chicago, 1988).

The Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era | 13:4 Oct. 2014 495
 of family violence directly, even as they continued their traditional
practice of blaming family violence largely on alcohol. The
Women’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU) recognized physi-
cal security against abusive husbands as a major goal in the wom-
en’s rights agenda. Frances Willard argued that the vote would
protect women against family violence resulting from alcohol
consumption.63 Yet Willard promoted public shaming and moral
suasion against intemperance and spousal abuse, rather than advo-
cating the empowering of women through self-defense training.

Advocates of self-defense training promoted a more radical

approach to family violence. American discussions of women’s self-
defense included a common theme of providing women with an
element of protection against the threat of violence in the home.
An 1892 article in the St. Paul Daily Globe, in discussing the popular
fad of women training in boxing, offered an amusing though signif-
icant warning to men: “Prospective husbands had better beware,
not only of concealed claws but of well-trained fists.”64 By 1915,
De Witt Van Court, a boxing instructor in Los Angeles, felt more
confident in offering a definitive statement about the domestic ad-
vantages of self-defense. He only half-jokingly suggested, “Such a
course, girls, enables you to master the art of self-defense and that
mastery might come in handy someday if you happen to marry a
man who is inclined to become rambunctious.”65

Radical English women more openly advocated the study of self-

defense not only as protection on the street, but also as protection
in the home. Edith Garrud, the well-known jiu-jitsu instructor
who trained English suffragettes, offered public demonstrations of
her skills through the performance of suffragette skits. A condensed
version of one such play, illustrated with images of Garrud perform-
ing the techniques, was published in 1911 in Health and Strength
magazine (a British magazine that focused on physical culture).
The play, tellingly titled, “Ju-Jutsu as a Husband-Tamer,” recounted
the story of a produce seller’s wife who after being taught jiu-jitsu
“tames her drunken husband into subjection.” The theme of family
violence is clear throughout, as the husband makes several attempts

63
Ellen Carol Dubois and Linda Gordon, “Seeking Ecstasy on the Battlefield: Danger
and Pleasure in Nineteenth-Century Feminist Sexual Thought,” Feminist Studies 9
(Spring 1983): 10–11; Suzanne M. Marilley, Woman Suffrage and the Origins of
Liberal Feminism in the United States, 1820–1920 (Cambridge, MA, 1997), 100.
64
“A Fad for Fighting,” St. Paul Daily Globe, July 10, 1892, 12.
65
“Claims Boxing Cures Girls’ Bad Tempers,” El Paso Herald, Jan. 27, 1915, Sport and
Classified Section.

496 | Rouse and Slutsky | Empowering the Physical and Political Self
 to strike his wife. Each attack is thwarted by the woman’s mastery of
self-defense. His violent energy is redirected through jiu-jitsu tech-
niques, and eventually he has no alternative but to surrender and
agree to live in domestic harmony. The wife warns her husband,
“When you’re drunk I’ll always be a match for you.” The husband
is forced to concede, “Then I’ll never get drunk again.” The play
ends with husband and wife embracing and a suggestion of future
domestic bliss.66 Diana Looser has argued that Garrud’s “message
was clear: the physical practice of jujitsu had revolutionary potential
for women, opening up unprecedented freedoms through new
bodily acts.”67 The idea that such training could empower women
to defend themselves against domestic violence—the most personal
and common form of violence and oppression of women—
represented the culmination of women’s success in challenging the
patriarchal power structure.

In the early twentieth century, self-defense training came to symbolize

the emerging status of the “new woman” who embraced personal and
political independence. An article in the San Francisco Chronicle that
highlighted the numerous female boxers in the country quoted a well-
known athlete as saying that “the modern girl athlete is getting better
every year. She is a very different creature from the old piano-playing,
fancy-work type who was half the time afraid of being alive. This new
type of woman is alive all over, all the time.”68 Contemporaries also
made explicit links between political and physical empowerment.
The New York Tribune insisted in 1918 that the entrance of women
into the sport of boxing was a sure sign that suffrage was “here to
stay.”69 Another article published in the Chronicle in 1922 noted the
power of the new woman and offered a warning to potential burglars:
“Life is not what is used to be even for burglars since women forgot how
to scream. In the old days a marauder who encountered a stray female
could be fairly certain that she would either cower beneath the sheets or
yell for assistance. He acted accordingly. But now—what with higher
education, bobbed hair, jiu-jitsu, knickerbockers and the like—she
has ceased to function according to the best traditions of her sex. She
neither cowers nor yells. And she may do almost anything.” In this
and similar stories, modern women in the 1920s had empowered them-
selves intellectually, politically, fashionably, and physically. These

66
“Ju-Jitsu as a Husband Tamer: A Suffragette Play with a Moral,” Health & Strength,
Apr. 8, 1911, 339, repr. in Journal of Non-Lethal Combatives 1 (Dec. 1999), http://ejmas.
com/jnc/jncart_healthstrength_0100.htm (accessed June 15, 2014).
67
Looser, “Radical Bodies and Dangerous Ladies,” 11.
68
“Ware the Woman with the Wicked Jolt,” San Francisco Chronicle, Apr. 6, 1913, 5.
69
“Suffrage Here to Stay,” New York Tribune, Nov. 28, 1918, 15.

The Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era | 13:4 Oct. 2014 497
 Figure 8. Edith Garrud’s play touched on the issue of domestic violence while
only half-jokingly advocating jiu-jitsu as a potential cure for wife beating.
“Ju-Jutsu as a Husband-Tamer: A Suffragette Play with a Moral,” Health &
Strength, Apr. 8, 1911, 339, courtesy of Journal of Non-Lethal Combatives (Dec.
1999), http://ejmas.com/jnc/jncart_healthstrength_0100.htm.

multiple elements amounted to an independent identity for women

who could not only vote, cut their hair and hemlines, drink and
smoke in public, but also venture into the modern environments
equipped with the skills to defend themselves.70

70
“What Chance Has a Burglar against Girls Like These?” San Francisco Chronicle,
Standard Magazine section, June 11, 1922, 3. A 1925 article details yet another

498 | Rouse and Slutsky | Empowering the Physical and Political Self
 Louise Le Noir Thomas, writing in 1917 in the Ogden Standard, sim-
ilarly explained that much had changed in the lives of women. The
idea that a woman was the “protected sex” who must busy herself
with the gentle arts of singing, cooking, and sewing had long since
disappeared. “In this feminist rebellion that has been occurring since
suffrage was introduced in England, women have been drawn more
and more into the business world” and therefore into “innumerable
activities and interests that take them out of the snug seclusion of
the home and make them subject to the dangers that exist on
every highway.” Thomas argued that women “have refused to be
called the ‘weaker sex,’ and the ‘pampered sex,’ and have shown
such aversion to the ‘protection of the male,’ so-called that men
have almost begun to take them at their word and treat them as
equals in not only intellectuality, but in physical strength.” She fur-
ther insisted, “It is not unwomanly to protect herself—rather it is
unwomanly to be overpowered by the assailant.”71

By the 1920s the association between physically strong women and

politically capable women was clear. The entry of women into the
world of the “manly arts” symbolized the success of women in pen-
etrating the political world. Just as the female body had long been
subjected to violence and abuse, women now used their bodies as
a tool to fight against that abuse and violence and secure for them-
selves a newfound sense of freedom. Although not all women who
pursued boxing and jiu-jitsu during this era recognized the revolu-
tionary implication of their actions, most women noted the sense of
personal strength that inevitably resulted from their physical activ-
ity. They embraced it as liberation from the oppressive gender ste-
reotypes that had heretofore limited their activities and confined
them to the domestic sphere.

case of a woman trained in jiu-jitsu who successfully defended herself against a

thief. The author used the incident to illustrate why all American girls should
learn self-defense and further made the link between self-defense training and the
new liberated woman: “All Honor to Miss Howry and other girls who carry the doc-
trine of equal rights into the practical field of self-defense!” “A Girl’s Jiu Jitsu,
Washington Post, Sept. 2, 1925, 6.
71
Louise Le Noir Thomas, “How a Woman Can Protect Herself upon the Street,”
Ogden Standard, Magazine Section, Apr. 14, 1917.

The Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era | 13:4 Oct. 2014 499